Spenser, Drayton and the Question of Britain

Abstract

A number of recent studies has made the strong case that the effect of English expansion within the British was primarily to unify the peoples concerned and help form identities of the emerging nations. Thus Marc Caball, in a thorough and meticulously researched book on early modern bardic poetry in Ireland, has argued that in the face of the invasions the bards ‘initiated a pioneering re-evaluation of traditional Gaelic modes of communal definition which culminated in the creation of the modern Irish national identity’. 1 Peter Roberts has claimed that the union of England and Wales which became law in 1543 spread a single code of legal practice to Wales and so served to release ‘the Welsh from the sense of occupying only sections of their own country … and they could now be said to inhabit a land united for the first time in their history’. 2 In fact, in answering Gwyn Williams’s famous question, when was Wales? Roberts unequivocally answers that ‘Wales was the creation of the Henrician “union” with England’. 3 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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